Sweet Dreams, Story Catcher: A commemorative collection of Portland Magazine essays by Brian Doyle

by Brian Doyle, Janna Lopez (Editor)

Prologue by Janna Lopez:
"Brian Doyle dreams to reincarnate as a hawk or otter. But mostly an otter. Through gratitude and mercy he weeps joyful resonance over the best life ever:
a woman too cool for him deft with paint brush,
twin boys and a daughter whose whimsey ignite him like a firefly,
parents he professes his luck to like, love and admire,
brothers bearing wildness and a sister most sweet,
a childhood adorned by basketballs, books, bugs, and Godly beliefs,
slathers of friends and colleagues and students and faculty, each unassumingly stitching and shearing devoted memories into his human expression of love and miracles, words, reflections, observations and lore about our flawed misdeeds and depths of forgiveness.

Brian Doyle's passing tears become ours.
And so goes the hope, may this collection provide comfort.

In our hearts we hear his beating,
in his captured stories he observes the stardust and cosmos,
the knowing and the finite.

He was and is of this earth
where no mind can ever master
the mystery of
grace,
or laughter,
or humility,
or sorrow,
over the brilliant lights who dim too soon."

141 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Doyle's essays and poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The American Scholar, Orion, Commonweal, and The Georgia Review, among other magazines and journals, and in The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Kansas City Star, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Ottawa Citizen, and Newsday, among other newspapers. He was a book reviewer for The Oregonian and a contributing essayist to both Eureka Street magazine and The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia.

Doyle's essays have also been reprinted in:

* the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005;
* in Best Spiritual Writing 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2005; and
* in Best Essays Northwest (2003);
* and in a dozen other anthologies and writing textbooks.

As for awards and honors, he had three startling children, an incomprehensible and fascinating marriage, and he was named to the 1983 Newton (Massachusetts) Men's Basketball League all-star team, and that was a really tough league.

Doyle delivered many dozens of peculiar and muttered speeches and lectures and rants about writing and stuttering grace at a variety of venues, among them Australian Catholic University and Xavier College (both in Melbourne, Australia), Aquinas Academy (in Sydney, Australia); Washington State, Seattle Pacific, Oregon, Utah State, Concordia, and Marylhurst universities; Boston, Lewis & Clark, and Linfield colleges; the universities of Utah, Oregon, Pittsburgh, and Portland; KBOO radio (Portland), ABC and 3AW radio (Australia); the College Theology Society; National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," and in the PBS film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero (2002).

Doyle was a native of New York, was fitfully educated at the University of Notre Dame, and was a magazine and newspaper journalist in Portland, Boston, and Chicago for more than twenty years. He was living in Portland, Oregon, with his family when died at age 60 from complications related to a brain tumor.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Brian Doyle arrived at the University of Portland in 1991."

So simply begins Sweet Dreams, Story Catcher, a memorial collection of the essays Doyle wrote for the University of Portland's Portland magazine during the ensuing quarter-century. Our copy arrived in the mail as a gift, an unexpected but most welcome note of grace. Brian Doyle died, you see, taken from us ahead of any reasonable schedule, in 2017. He was not that much older than I (a stern chase I'd never win), but he always seemed so much wiser.

This book's deceptively slim, a mere 141 numbered pages, and omits both an ISBN and original publication dates, but even so, I took a long time to read Doyle's essays—I could only get through one or two at a time without weeping, without laughing, without stopping to consider what he had said.

The best reason we have schools, I think, is to learn things for which we do not have words or equations. All teachers admit that their students will remember very little, if anything, of the curriculum they were taught; in the end what teachers really do is offer context, manners of approach, and the subtle suggestion that a cheerful humility before all problems of every sort is the only way toward useful grapple, let alone solution. What teachers really teach, it seems to me, is not a subject, but ways to be; a poor teacher teaches one way, and a fine teacher teaches many, some of which may be, to your amazement and relief, ways for you, the student, to open, to navigate, perhaps to soar.
—"The Brilliant Floor," p.10

This is only the first of many passages in Sweet Dreams, Story Catcher that made me pause, and nod, and smile with recognition at an observation that I'd never thought of in quite that way before.

Catholic school, as vicious as Roman rule...
—From the song "I Will Follow You Into The Dark," by Death Cab for Cutie

Doyle may well have gotten his "knuckles bruised by a lady in black," as that song goes on to say, but if so he drew very different conclusions from the experience. Like Fred Rogers' work, Doyle's writing sprang from a faith that was like bedrock—rarely obtrusive, even when he was writing for the Catholic University of Portland, but always firmly underpinning his work. Now, my own habits of worship foundered on multiple rocks long ago during my stormy adolescence, but... if I were to become a big-C Christian ever again, Doyle is the kind of Christian I'd aspire to be.

Ah... quite by chance, I recently ran across an email I'd sent back in 2011 to my friend Clayton (himself no longer able to communicate with the living, alas). This story about Doyle, a small part of that correspondence, seems appropriate to include here. I'm reformatting it a bit, but what I said then remains otherwise unchanged:

Roberta {my beloved wife, then as now} and I recently got to see local editor and author Brian Doyle speak, and it was amazing. Doyle is the editor of the University of Portland's award-winning alumni magazine, an insightful essayist, and most recently has out a novel called Mink River, a somewhat fabulist exploration of the Oregon coast. He's a New Yorker, transplanted to Portland by way of Boston and Chicago, and an accomplished raconteur.

He shared a story with us that he's never written down, about the time when he had four minutes alone with the Dalai Lama... and got into an argument with him... about sports. Seriously.

The Dalai Lama was in Portland a few years ago, and did some talks at U.P. (Roberta got to see him speak there, as a matter of fact)... Doyle wandered into the alumni lounge, which is lined with the usual sports photos and memorabilia, and came upon this little guy wearing a saffron robe, and didn't recognize him. Hey, there were lots of little guys in yellow robes wandering around the campus that weekend. So they're both looking at a photo of some football triumph or the like, when the guy says something like "Soccer is the greatest game ever known," Doyle—remember he's a Noo Yawker—says right back, "Whaddaya mean, pal?" (Yeah. "Pal".) And then he goes off on how basketball is the greatest game—fast-moving, everybody gets a chance to score, lots of drama... they're really getting into it, going back and forth, and it's only as some of the Dalai Lama's entourage comes into the lounge that Doyle finally twigs to the fact that he's been butting heads with the DALAI LAMA... and before he can do more than just gape at how he's just spent the opportunity of a lifetime, the Lama is being whisked out the door.

But as he was leaving, the Dalai Lama turned around, raised his finger, and told Doyle, "We will continue this discussion later on... in this life, OR THE NEXT! Ah-hah-hah-hah..."

It probably loses something when written down, anyway, but at that point Doyle had me sold. And the whole rest of the talk was good, too; self-deprecating humor, entertaining little tales and set-pieces, but also some neat little ad-hoc responses to audience questions; this was a book club audience and they'd pretty much all (except for me) already read Mink River, so there was a lot of banter about the book and what worked and what didn't... pretty much everything we could have asked from an author appearance.

That was the man as I saw him in life, and as he appears in Sweet Dreams, Story Catcher.

Later on, in another essay, Doyle says,

I will never write books about martens...
—"Meeting Marten," p.44

Doyle was wrong, occasionally, but never about the bigger things. He did, eventually, write a book about martens; I was able to read his novel Martin Marten in 2016.

Sweet Dreams, Story Catcher is a memorial in Doyle's own words—it's not about Doyle; it is Doyle. And so I think it's fitting to end this review (though as he says there is no end) with Doyle's own words, again.

I think maybe parents, despite appearances, haven't the slightest idea how to bring up their children, but simply keep at it with as much kindness as they can summon to the work. I think maybe we are making our children's beds all day long, year after year, until suddenly the child in the bed is a woman kneeling on another floor in another city making a bed for her child, and even then you don't stop making her bed, but lend a hand with the new bed too. So there is no end to the making of beds, including your own.
—"Making the Bed," p.103

[Shilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I come back to Brian Doyle every winter and will continue to do so until my dying day. This collection filled with micro-essays is a splendid deep dive into snapshots of a man well versed it what it means to love the whole wide world.

[Georgia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read three of Doyle’s essays a day.. in 1991 he came to Portland, Oregon to be the editor of Portland University’s paper so this book is how he viewed many topics. I especially liked these: Abraham Lincoln, Smoke and The Cedar People!🥸

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Savored this book for four years. Why? Because for one, Brian Doyle left this world too soon. I'd read all his other secular work, and wanted to savor this, a commemorative collection of essays taken from "Portland" magazine, released at his memorial and featuring beautiful accompanying artwork. Also, I met the editor of this at an unrelated event and after sharing my love of Doyle's work, she gifted me this book. So special. I read it a bit at a time. It brightened some hard times and also underlined some good times, like a weekend on the Oregon Coast with a beach view.
The writing itself needs no review. Brian Doyle is wit, wisdom and wonder personified.